On August 24, 2016, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced the formal end of the fifty‐year‐long war with the guerrilla FARC, as the armed group agreed to lay down their arms and participate in the 2018 general elections as a political party. The peace deal was met with a mix of excitement and skepticism. Since then, almost six hundred human rights activists have been killed, homicidal violence against youth in major Colombian cities has remained high, and the prospect of positive peace in black territories is at best elusive. In this article, I ask: what are we to make of postconflict interventions that assume transition to peace to be the magic moment of a new social order, when the elapsed time of (post)war is experienced as a timeless event according to one's racial alterity? Can the normative framework of conflict/postconflict, wartime, and peacetime account for the trans‐historical and timeless conditions of racial subjugation blacks endure in societies of the African diaspora? [ Afro‐pessimism, racial violence, peace‐building, liberal peace, black protest]